WELCOME

VIRTUALIZATION, IN COMPUTING, REFERS TO THE ACT OF CREATING A VIRTUAL VERSION OF SOMETHING, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO A VIRTUAL COMPUTER HARDWARE PLATFORM, OPERATING SYSTEM (OS), STORAGE DEVICE, OR COMPUTER NETWORK RESOURCES.

VMware announced on June 9th, 2016 the new version of the NSX platform version 6.2.3. A minor release to their network virtualization platform.

The NSX solution is an innovative approach to solving long-standing network provisioning bottlenecks within the data center, and it allows for the integration of switching, routing and upper-layer services into an integrated application and network orchestration platform. With an overlay solution that may not require hardware upgrades, NSX offers customers a potentially quicker way of taking advantage of SDN capabilities by decoupling the network from hardware into a software abstraction layer allowing the end-user to programmatically create, provision and manage networks.

What's New

Networking and Edge Services

Edge Firewall adds SYN flood protection: This protects vms from north-south SYN flood attacks and allows for increased security for public-facing workloads. This is disabled by default so you will need to use the NSX REST API to enable it.

Edge Upgrade Behavior: Improved upgrade or redeploy with replacement NSX Edge VMs deployed before upgrade. Note the default value for TCP connection timeout is changed to 21600 seconds from the previous value of 3600 seconds to support this feature.

Hardware Layer 2 Gateway Integration: Expands physical connectivity options by integrating 3rd-party hardware gateway switches into the NSX logical network. This can be used for integration of physical workloads into the NSX environment.

VXLAN Port Changes: Port 4789 now in version 6.2.3 and later. The previous default VXLAN UDP port number was 8472.

Operations and Troubleshooting

NSX Dashboards: Providing visibility into the overall health of NSX in one central view.

SNMP Support: Configure SNMP traps for NSX events from NSX Manager, NSX Controller and Edge with support for SNMPv2c.

Change in default license & evaluation key distribution: The new default license "NSX for vShield Endpoint" enables use of NSX for deploying and managing vShield Endpoint for anti-virus offload capability only. vShield Manager is EOL in September of 2016 and it was previously not possible to use NSX Manager & Guest Introspection without normal NSX license before.

There are a lot more enhancement like:

NSX Edge — Resource Reservation

Cross VC NSX — Universal Distributed Logical Router (DLR) Upgrade

Flexible SNAT / DNAT rule creation

NSX Edge VM (ESG, DLR) now shows both Live Location and Desired Location